


letters from all of my friends, dead and alive

by meios



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts, Mentions of War, Mentions of self-harm, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 13:38:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1607090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meios/pseuds/meios
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers get letters, emails, messages.</p>
            </blockquote>





	letters from all of my friends, dead and alive

**Author's Note:**

> IMPORTANT: Assumes that Clint Barton has eighty percent hearing loss as per the comics.

**i. susan**  
  
He gets the letter on a Monday.  
  
She’s a little girl, age seven, from what it says at the end, that has black hair and brown eyes and scars all along her body. She likes to smile, she says, and he’s her favorite superhero.  _Superhero_ , he reads, and the word tastes bitter in his mouth, but he keeps reading, looks at the picture attached with a colored-in, bright green blob with a big black frown, saving multicolored orbs from what must be a fire.  
  
They hang from what must be the Hulk’s arms, and Bruce has no idea how this letter got to him, doesn’t remember, doesn’t want to know, but the little girl, Susan, tells him,  _I have two sides too, Mr. Hulk. I have the clean side and the messy side and even though I don’t like the messy side sometimes, it’s still a part of me. I can be big too._  
  
Bruce tucks the letter into his pocket, and he knows that the Big Guy likes it there too.  
  
**ii. jacob**  
  
She gets the email on a Tuesday.  
  
He’s fifteen. He doesn’t know what it means to feel pain anymore, and he’s so numb, he tells her, vents out his past into multiple paragraphs, pockmarked with,  _I know you won’t read this. I don’t know why I’m writing you._  But he does, he says, and he’s opened himself up so often that his skin is scar tissue and the sharpness doesn’t do anything anymore.  
  
He’s fifteen and his name is Jacob and he’s writing to tell her that her ability to put herself out there, to show the awful things that she’s done to the world, has given him the ability to do the same.  
  
_I got help_ , he says.  
  
Natasha doesn’t cry. She smiles.  
  
So did she.  
  
**iii. dani**  
  
He gets the message on a Wednesday.  
  
A series of direct messages on his Twitter, actually, and there must be a hundred or so, but Tony reads them all. From an eighteen-year-old girl named Dani. California. A girl who hides behind a Salvador Dali painting for an icon and regularly posts about the things she’s writing, the books she’s reading, the amount of thought she puts into everything.  
  
_Every word I write is deliberate,_  she says,  _and everything I don’t write is deliberate. And you—_  
  
And Tony, Tony’s the reason she has inspiration now. Tony, with his one-eighty, his saving her mother from falling into the ocean, his attitude towards life. She smiles more because of him.  _Thank you,_  she writes.  
  
_No, thank you,_  is what he replies with.  
  
**iv. carys**  
  
He gets the letter on a Thursday.  
  
Darcy hands it to him upon one of his visits, unopened, marked with a sticker. It’s shiny, holographic; it depicts a Pokémon—Pikachu, from what it says on the bottom. He smiles fondly at its design, opens the envelope, only to find a carefully scrawled letter on lineless paper. It slants after a while, downward, as if the child—age five, Carys—had changed the angle upon which she approached the message at some point.  
  
Carys tells him that her brother is lost too.  _He’s with my mama_ , she says. And Thor Odinson does sit down, gazing at the letter with a quiet look about his face. The little girl tells him, in the same way that children speak, that he shouldn’t be sad. She heard, on the news—( _because Daddy watches that a lot_ )—that his brother did a lot of bad things.  
  
_Really bad things._  
  
Thor laughs at the understatement of the year.  
  
And no apologies could fix the bad things that Loki did, no.  _My brother did bad things too,_  she says,  _and I still love him. You’re really strong. I like your hammer. Does it have a name? I have a fish named Bubbles._  
  
Thor writes back on a Friday.  _Its name is Mjolnir_ , he writes in perfected script, among other things.  
  
**v. georgia**  
  
He gets the letter on a Saturday.  
  
She tells him that she’s ten and she’s deaf, and Georgia, oh, Georgia says that her mom told her that there’s an archer out there that can’t hear very well either. And she writes that she had smiled so widely at that that her face had hurt, and he’s smiling now. So widely that his face hurts.  
  
She sends along a drawing of her beside him, holding a bow and arrow, nocked and at the ready to strike, and Clint notes that his hearing aids are in, that they both wear sunglasses, that they’ve both got the most intense expressions.  
  
He hangs it on his wall, sends a drawing of his own right back:  
  
_Super Georgia, Master Archer._  
  
**vi. erik**  
  
He reads the letter on a Sunday.  
  
Erik is a veteran. Not from World War II, no, but from Iraq. And Erik is forty-five and he’s lost all sensation in his mangled legs, and perhaps the good Captain doesn’t have time to read all of his letters, but he just wants to tell him how blessed this country is to still have some people who stand by what they believe in.  
  
And Steve pauses for a moment, just a moment, to take in the slight tremble of the handwriting, the way that everything seems to slow for a second as he reads,  _You’re everything that I wanted to be as a kid. And you’re everything I want to be as an adult._  
  
And he writes back one small note:  
  
_Erik, you already are._  
  
And he hand delivers it on that same Sunday, smiles, salutes.


End file.
